Fenton's Quest eBook

“Shall you consider it your duty to seek out
or advertise for Percival Nowell?” asked Gilbert.

“I shall be in no hurry to do that, in the absence
of any proof of his daughter’s death. My
first duty would be to look for her.”

“God grant you may be more fortunate than I
have been! There is my card, Mr. Medler.
You will be so good as to let me have a line immediately,
at that address, if you obtain any tidings of Mrs.
Holbrook.”

“I will do so.”

CHAPTER XXX.

STRICKEN DOWN.

A hansom carried Gilbert Fenton to the Temple, without
loss of time. There was a fierce hurry in his
breast, a heat and fever which he had scarcely felt
since the beginning of his troubles; for his lurking
suspicion of his friend had gathered shape and strength
all at once, and possessed his mind now to the exclusion
of every other thought.

He ran quickly up the stairs. The outer and inner
doors of John Saltram’s chambers were both ajar.
Gilbert pushed them open and went in. The familiar
sitting-room looked just a little more dreary than
usual. The litter of books and papers, ink-stand
and portfolio, was transferred to one of the side-tables,
and in its place, on the table where his friend had
been accustomed to write, Gilbert saw a cluster of
medicine-bottles, a jug of toast-and-water, and a
tray with a basin of lukewarm greasy-looking beef-tea.

The door between the two rooms stood half open, and
from the bedchamber within Gilbert heard the heavy
painful breathing of a sleeper. He went to the
door and looked into the room. John Saltram was
lying asleep, in an uneasy attitude, with both arms
thrown over his head. His face had a haggard
look that was made all the more ghastly by two vivid
crimson spots upon his sunken cheeks; there were dark
purple rings round his eyes, and his beard was of
more than a week’s growth.

“Ill,” Gilbert muttered, looking aghast
at this dreary picture, with strangely conflicting
feelings of pity and anger in his breast; “struck
down at the very moment when I had determined to know
the truth.”

The sick man tossed himself restlessly from side to
side in his feverish sleep, changed his position two
or three times with evident weariness and pain, and
then opened his eyes and stared with a blank unseeing
gaze at his friend. That look, without one ray
of recognition, went to Gilbert’s heart somehow.

“O God, how fond I was of him!” he said
to himself. “And if he has been a traitor!
If he were to die like this, before I have wrung the
truth from him—­to die, and I not dare to
cherish his memory—­to be obliged to live
out my life with this doubt of him!”

This doubt! Had he much reason to doubt two minutes
afterwards, when John Saltram raised himself on his
gaunt arm, and looked piteously round the room?